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Updated: June 9, 2025
While this advantage is undeniable, one may question whether it was not bought at too great a price and whether there would not have been a certain profit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to the mark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater care in structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricter veracity in the treatment of characters.
Perhaps it is a consequence of this variety of method, which lets prose-fiction proffer itself to every passer-by, that we recognize in the Victorian novel the plasticity of form and the laxity of structure which we have discovered to be characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.
Of all the models of prose-fiction which the Tudor translations had given to English literature, the first to be copied was that of Cervantes's Don Quixote, rendered into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. Swift must have had the rambling method of Cervantes well in mind when he wrote his Gulliver; and Smollett confessedly took it as his pattern and set out to imitate.
However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration, the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more and more authors of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially, prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson.
For it is no doubt nearly as annoying to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work, sooner or later.
That this censure and caution should in many instances be indiscriminate, can surprize no one, who recollects how rare a quality discrimination is; and how much better it suits indolence, as well as ignorance, to lay down a rule, than to ascertain the exceptions to it: we are acquainted with a careful mother whose daughters while they never in their lives read a novel of any kind, are permitted to peruse, without reserve, any plays that happen to fall in their way; and with another, from whom no lessons, however excellent, of wisdom and piety, contained in a prose-fiction, can obtain quarter; but who, on the other hand, is no less indiscriminately indulgent to her children in the article of tales in verse, of whatever character.
In his forty-seventh year, having so far cast his most important work into the poetic form, he contributed to Blackwood's Magazine his Shepherd's Calendar, followed in the same year by the publishing of The Brownie of Bodsbeck; these were his first two serious excursions into the realm of prose-fiction.
In the intense and visual quality of the atmosphere with which he pervades his narrative he has no equal among the writers of English prose-fiction until Sir Walter Scott appears. "Apuleius has enveloped his world of marvels in a heavy air of witchery and romance. You wander with Lucius across the hills and through the dales of Thessaly.
Apparently the dramatic form is the more attractive and the more satisfactory, in spite of its greater difficulty and its greater danger. Perhaps, indeed, we may discover in this difficulty and danger one reason why the drama is more interesting than prose-fiction. A true artist cannot but tire of a form that is too facile; and he is ever yearning for a grapple with stubborn resistance.
In a general way you will be able to form your own judgment on this subject, by observing how much safer prose-fiction is for yourself at times, when your feelings are excited, and your mind unsettled and exhausted.
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